Page 23 of The Half Life of Valery K

‘Hi,’ Valery offered. But then, if you were a super-secret Englishman, you’d get rid of the accent. Surely. ‘I’ve not been arrested.’

‘There’s a body,’ the operator supplied.

‘Kolkhanov,’ Shenkov said immediately, ‘stay where you are, we’ll be with you soon. Do not spook and run away, I’m not going to accuse you of murder unless you murdered him.’

‘Honestly that hadn’t occurred to me,’ Valery said, unsettled that it hadn’t. It should have; and he should not have trusted Shenkov to be above board purely because he thought the man was fascinating.

The KGB were there within twenty minutes. It was organised; they came with wading gear so they could reach the corpse, and they had a trolley and a body bag. Shenkov must have been having a dull day, because he came himself. He seemed to feel the cold badly; he had a proper coat on, hands sunk into his pockets. It was the standard officer coat, light grey, but it was tailored, or else he was exactly the shape whoever had designed it had hoped people were.

‘No one’s been reported missing,’ Shenkov murmured as the waders managed to lift the body on to its plastic-lined trolley. They closed a rubber casing straight over the top. ‘We should have heard about this by now. He’s outside the perimeter, he’s been in the water a while, he should have missed at least one curfew.’

‘Where’s the next nearest town?’ asked Valery, who was perched on the bonnet of the Land Rover, because the metal was warm.

‘The exclusion zone is a forty-kilometre radius from the plant. So someone we don’t know about wandered out here beyond the perimeter fence, attracting the attention of precisely no one, and drowned. Terrific,’ Shenkov said, and began to turn away.

‘He didn’t drown,’ Valery said.

‘Pardon?’

Valery slid down from the bonnet to go after him. ‘Well, maybe he did, but he didn’t just drown. His hair is gone. It was radiation sickness.’

Shenkov looked down at him. ‘From the pool?’

‘No, he would have been burned. He must have inhaled something.’

‘Then what are you saying?’ Shenkov said, his eyes and his voice suddenly full of serrated edges.

Valery had to step back from him. The electric echo of the cattle prod prowled down his ribs. He wished he could make his nervous system shut up. ‘I’m just telling you what the data is. He clearly had radiation sickness. I’m sure your coroner will say the same – look, never mind. I’ll let you get on.’

‘If he had radiation sickness acute enough for hair loss, then that’s upward of two hundred roentgen, and we have a leak. Are you telling me that we have a leak of two hundred roentgen and no one’s reported it to me?’

‘Can you stop inferring things?’ Valery said unsteadily. He wanted to retreat more, but there was a tree behind him and he was already among the roots. ‘I’m not telling you any conclusions, I’m telling you he had radiation sickness. Ask the coroner.’

Shenkov seemed to see he had backed Valery into a tree and stepped back a little. Annoyed with himself, Valery stayed where he was. The part of him that liked doing magic tricks was amazingly unavailable. He was just floundering. ‘Keep that to yourself, please.’

‘Keep it to myself?’

‘Before I drown you in that radioactive pool,’ Shenkov said softly, ‘please assure me that you understand why I’d prefer you didn’t go back to the Lighthouse and announce to everyone that you found someone dead of radiation sickness five kilometres from the complex?’

Valery shook his head once. ‘Whatever caused this, whether it’s a leak or something in the ground, or a contaminated object, it is very dangerous indeed. You should be sealing off everything in conceivable walking distance, and you should certainly be warning people in the city to watch out for any signs of radiation sickness.’

‘It isn’t in the city or we would know about it by now. You don’t say a word.’

Right next to Shenkov like this, Valery felt his own fragility. He might as well have been one of those dying pine trees, made of nothing more useful than rusty wood switches and sawdust. He was vividly aware of the black pool right beside him, and the invisible, roiling storm of radiation in the mud at its base.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’re all quite safe. I expect he’s just a funny-shaped giraffe.’

‘I’m not enjoying this tightrope act as much as I was,’ Shenkov told him.

‘Shoot me, then, see if I care,’ Valery said. ‘After you’ve shot me, though, better get some people out here with dosimeters that measure above three roentgen. In hazmat gear.’

The other KGB men seemed eager to get away from the pool; they were already in their Land Rover. The engine came on with an unnecessary snarl. The man driving must have forgotten the size of the thing, because he reversed too fast and straight into a dead silver birch, which snapped. It fell shockingly fast and, although Valery could see what was happening, he couldn’t move. He was right beneath the trunk.

Shenkov snatched him out of the way and pulled him to one side as the tree smashed into the pool. He bent forward enough to shield Valery from the splash, then turned him round, much more gently.

‘Are you all right?’ He sounded honestly frightened.

Mute, Valery nodded. Shenkov’s gloved hands were still on his ribs, holding him steady on the uneven ground. It felt so safe it was terrible. He swallowed and found his voice again. ‘Thank you. Get that coat off before it soaks through—’